The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® 4.2 specification, bringing the very latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API. OpenGL 4.2 integrates developer feedback and continues the rapid evolution of this royalty-free specification while maintaining full backwards compatibility - enabling applications to incrementally use new features, while portably accessing state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms.
The OpenGL 4.2 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.20 update to the OpenGL Shading Language. The OpenGL 4.2 specification contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance. The full specification is available for immediate download.

The Khronos Group is thrilled to announce a 3D content development contest with a $500 cash prize for the winner. Deadline is Sunday August 7th, 2011 at 11:59PM PST. The winner will be announced SIGGRAPH in Vancouver and be awarded $500. Full details are available at OurBricks.com.

Using COLLADA Computer in Google Earth gives a 3D animation of the hurricane Dolly landfall on 23 July 2008. Using collocated NEXRAD and CloudSat radar data with visualization of CloudSat provided by the A-Train Data Depot Giovanni. The result is a very impressive 3D look at the hurricane and surrounding cloud formations. Math operations can be used on all the spacial object using the COLLADA structures right in Google Earth.

A few weeks ago, Google became aware of a security issue with WebGL: shaders could be used to indirectly deduce the contents of textures uploaded to the GPU. As a result, Chrome 13 (and Firefox 5) will no longer allow cross-domain media as a WebGL texture. The default behavior will be a DOM_SECURITY_ERR. However, applications may still utilize images and videos from another domain with the cooperation of the server hosting the media, otherwise known as CORS.

Apples latest release of Final Cut Pro is a ground up rewrite offering lots of GUI changes. The power behind this update lies under the hood. Final Cut Pro X supports 64-bit Cocoa APIs, and takes advantage of the power of GPUs OpenCL and multithreaded operations. The change will be obvious when you look at the Activity Monitor.

ShaderToy is a simple tool for OpenGL developers that lets you edit and display OpenGL ES shader programs on Android phones and tablets. It's a fun toy for learning and experimenting with shaders while on the move. The latest version includes the ability to save and load shaders to the SD card, and load texture images from the gallery.

SIGGRAPH Asia's inaugural symposium on Apps is in answer to the demand for innovation, sophistication, portability, and ubiquitous connectivity in the world of smart phones and tablets. The program aims to educate and explore how visual and animation techniques are applied on mobile devices to enhance the experience for end users and drive the use of advanced graphics capabilities on the multitude of new devices available today. Submitters to SIGGRAPH Asia’s Symposium on Apps can consider participating in presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and exhibits. Complete details are available on the SIGGRAPH Asia Symposium for Apps page. Submission deadline is September 15 2011.

Glare Technologies have announced the release of a new version of their flagship rendering product: Indigo Renderer version 3.0, which now includes support for both OpenCL and CUDA. Indigo is an unbiased, physically based and photo-realistic renderer which simulates the physics of light to achieve near-perfect image realism. With an advanced physical camera model, a super-realistic materials system and the ability to simulate complex lighting situations through Metropolis Light Transport, Indigo is capable of producing the highest levels of realism demanded by architectural and product visualisation.

This June saw an exciting Top 500 Supercomputer Site list. Japan bumped China out of first place with their 8162 TeraFlop 548,352 core machine. Interesting with this machine is that it runs on CPU's only, no GPU's. NVIDIA holds on to 3 of the top 10 spots. For complete stats and more information on the top ten fastest Super Computers, read the latest post from top500.org.